The pool was full of people when Loretta went under - her mother, her sisters, my husband, our friends. She slipped into the deep end from the shallow end, the drop abrupt. Only my husband saw.

He fished her out and she came up sputtering. She was 9 or 10 at the time. She hadn't screamed or thrashed. If he hadn't been watching…

We never take our eyes off them. Well, sometimes. When we blink. When we sleep.

But all the other times we're watching.

We watched them when they were infants, first in their bassinets, then in their cribs. We watched them in their swings, opening their eyes, looking around…

They are kids. Take away the wheelchairs and ventilators, the crutches, the aides, the letter boards, the speech machines, all the adaptive equipment and what you have is a group of kids hanging out on a spring day waiting for the speeches to end and the fun to begin…

The video tells the story, some of it, anyway. Proms are always magical. Function halls are transformed by balloons and soft lights into ballrooms and kids are transformed, too, by hopes and by dreams. Every girl is a princess on prom night. And every boy is Brad Pitt…

Every Saturday of my youth, from third grade up, winter or summer, rain or shine, my best friend Rosemary and I walked to the Turner Free Library in Randolph where we were allowed to borrow two books, no more. And where, until we were 12, we were confined to the young adult section…

She never had any children, not because she didn't want them but because she couldn't have them. She tried for years, during her 20s and 30s, without success. In the beginning, people would ask her, ``So when are you going to start a family?'' And she would smile and say, ``We're trying…

They are fixtures in your life, people you expect to see when you open a door, round a corner, turn on TV. It seems they have always been there - down the hall, down the street, just a phone call away.  “Hi Dad,'' I've been saying for 58 years, which is not actually always, but is always to me…

They don't watch TV. Their parents won't let them. The babies listen to music, show tunes and kids tunes instead. Except once in a while both children have been seen perched on their fathers' laps mesmerized by the Red Sox. But that's been it. A few innings of baseball. A few hours of Baby Einstein. And the rest of the time the TV…

For a secular world with a short attention span, we've been surprisingly consumed for a solid month with God and, for believers anyway, his representative here on Earth.

First there was Pope John Paul II's illness, which absorbed us. Then his death, which saddened us. Then his funeral, which was the most attended in…

By late Monday afternoon, you see them sprawled all over downtown Boston, wrapped in their Mylar blankets - proud, exhausted, happy, many of them in enormous pain, attempting to navigate subway steps backward.

I don't get it. I've tried. I've talked to friends. Friends of friends. My son. My boss. ``It was amazing,'' they all say. ``It was the best…

The pictures are so old that they're square and fringed in white, blurry silhouettes of my mother and me taken with a Brownie camera in the gloom of a rainy spring day. There we are in front of the Washington Monument. And there we are at the Changing of the Guard…

He used to have his coffee with cream. He drinks it black now - and without the doughnut. He doesn't eat bread, either. Or sweets. And he joined a gym, a place where the owner weighs you in, then watches and critiques your workout.

And he's quitting smoking, down from…

She doesn't look like a victim of sexual abuse. She doesn't look like a woman whose father beat and molested her for five years, from the time she was 3 until she was 8, until the state came and removed her from his home. 

A model, an actress and a screenwriter, Angela Shelton spoke last Wednesday at a dinner to benefit the women at Pine Street…

The news that Peter Jennings has cancer shouldn't come as a shock. Cancer is our number two killer, second only to heart disease. It's everywhere. Babies get it. Old people get it. It doesn't discriminate…

Instead of gaping at the horror in the world and the baseness, which is what we're usually doing, we're transfixed, for now, by the goodness and faithfulness of a single man. This is what one good person can do: change hearts, and heart by heart, little by little, make great changes in the heart of the world…

The shooting of Lawrence High School's hoop star, 18-year-old Hector Paniagua, is being reported as if the tragedy of this mayhem is that Paniagua, who had college scouts looking at him, may never play basketball again.

If only that were the worst of it…

We're predictable. Shoot up a bunch of white kids and we're all over it, like cats on milk. The people who run the media in this country are mostly white and when dead kids look like their kids, their faces are on the front page. And that's where they stay for days, while pundits and politicians ask the predictable…

Two snowstorms ago, when the trees were sealed in ice and car doors were frozen shut and car windows glazed, when everything looked as dead as Jack Nicholson at the end of  “The Shining,'' a friend said,  “If these trees bloom after all this, I am never again…

Jeannie and I used to say that even the road connects us, that it isn't just family - Jeannie is my husband's cousin - or our children or our love for one another that links us. But a ribbon of highway that runs from my door to hers, 142 miles and a straight shot - no twists and turns, just two hours and 20 minutes on a good day…

The tape they keep playing on TV in which Terri Schiavo appears to be smiling, the tape that television is so in love with, hurts to watch.

My mother was like Terri. She too was in a ``vegetative state,'' a phrase I hate because it's a lie and a condescension like ``idiot'' and ``imbecile'' - words that the medical profession used to use but gave up years ago…